This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (195 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dropbox for Debian

This is not free software but Dropbox is very popular and they did only provide an Ubuntu package that did not work on Debian. So I created an official package.

I have been in touch with Dropbox developers and they have been very helpful. They’ll shortly release a signature mechanism (with GPG) so that we can further improve the package by verifying the origin of the downloaded binaries.

SAT Britney

At the start of the month, I continued my work on the britney reimplementation (the software that creates testing out of unstable) but I quickly stalled it because the release managers asked the feedback of Stefano Zacchiroli and Ralf Treinen (who have extensive knowledge on the topic with their research work on Mancoosi) and I did not want to invest further work in case they would identify a major flow… the feedback came only very late this month and while it was somewhat negative, I still think it’s worth pursuing the effort for a bit longer.

Converted ftplib to multiarch

While dpkg still doesn’t support multiarch (no news from Guillem and no visible sign of progress :-(), unstable got all the remaining bits allowing us to convert libraries to multiarch (see the announce). As soon as the required libc6 landed in unstable, I looked into converting the only library package that I maintain. I had no major problem but I still identified 2 issues in Lintian (filed as #630164 and quickly fixed by Niels Thykier).

build-arch / build-indep support

For the 42th time in the last 10 years, the idea of using build-arch/build-indep targets in the rules file has surfaced again. I had already decided some time ago that I would accept a patch implementing a new field Build-Features to enable dpkg-buildpackage to use those targets and this time Bill Allombert completed such a patch so I merged it.

The technical committee also decided that it would take a final decision on this topic (see #629385). Roger Leigh provided useful input by doing an archive-wide rebuild with the various solutions suggested. Given that the majority would like to make the target mandatory at some point in the future, I provided the dpkg patch for my preferred solution. We would use “auto-detection” as a temporary measure until all packages have been converted to have the targets.

The technical committee has not yet taken any decision even though the discussion stalled since the 12th of June. But that’s usual with that body. I’m sure it will be solved during Debconf.

Misc dpkg work

Modified dpkg-source --after-build to automatically unapply patches if they have been applied by dpkg-source --before-build.

Lots of small bug fixes (#628726, #629582, #630996, #631435, #631439, #631547, #632168) and that’s just to keep with the flow of incoming bug reports!

Added 2 supplementary Perl modules to the supported API for the benefit of Lintian.

Spent an evening to track down the possible causes of an long-standing and annoying assertion failure related to triggers.

Updated my branch with improved triggers directives to take into account the feedback of Guillem, and merged it.

While doing this I discovered a design flaw with the usage of “prerm failed-upgrade” and merged a fix.

Discussed integration of dpkg-buildflags with debhelper in #544844 and decided of further improvements for dpkg-buildflags as a result.

Hamster applet update

Hamster-applet is a GNOME application which did not have a 3.0 release, but it had a development release (2.91.x). I checked out whether it was possible to package this version for experimental and have the applet work with the GNOME fallback mode. Apparently not, the code was not yet updated to be compatible with the newer panel.

Instead I uploaded the latest stable version (2.32.1) to unstable. It has some nice improvements in the standalone version (and the name of the executable changed). For usage with GNOME 3, I have created a custom shortcut to start it quickly (with gconf-editor set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 to “<Mod4>t” and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 to “hamster-time-tracker” because the GNOME 3 control panel does not seem to work to set custom keybindings currently).

Translated my professional website into English

While I’m grateful for all the people who are supporting my work, I’m still far from my goal to have one third of my time funded through donations and sales of products on this blog.

So I decided to also bring more visibility to my company and in particular to its Debian-related service offering. It was only available in French up to now so I translated it and expanded it a bit. My “support page” on this blog now also links to my company’s website.

BTW, I have discounted prices for individuals and non-profits who would like to benefit from my help to create Debian packages.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

This is the title of the upcoming translation of my book. The project now has a dedicated website: debian-handbook.info.

You can subscribe to its RSS feed to keep up with the latest news. The full table of contents is online along with a FAQ.

I’m actively looking for partners to help me promote the fundraising once it goes live. If you can reach a large set of readers interested by a good Debian book, get in touch with me to join the affiliate program.

The Board (Flattr link) is a sort of digital scrapbook. You can quickly paste and mix notes, pictures, videos, audio recording, … all on virtual pages. The result is very nice and it’s a GNOME application.

Knights (Flattr link) is a chess game for KDE. It’s nice to see some KDE applications on Flattr!

Syncany (Flattr link) is dropbox-like service (file synchronization between multiple computers) except that you can choose where to host your data. It’s a recent project but it looks very promising!

JDownloader (Flattr link) is a java application that simpliefies download of files from One-Click-Hosters like Rapidshare.com or Megaupload.com. It offers downloading in multiple parallel streams, captcha recognition, automated file extraction, and much more.

Ball and Paddle (Flattr link) is an extensible ball and paddle game that lets you script the events and attributes of the objects (balls, blocks, powerups, etc.) with GNU Guile, the official GNU extension language. It’s a GNU project: Flattr seems to be popular among GNU authors apparently.

Dropbox is a popular service to synchronize files between multiple computers. The service is entirely proprietary but the company is Linux friendly and provides Linux binaries ready to use. They even provide Ubuntu packages that wrap the dropbox client and provide integration with Nautilus.

A bit of story

Unfortunately for Debian users, those packages do not work on Debian due to a dependency that can’t be satisfied (because Ubuntu introduced an epoch on the version of their nautilus package that Debian doesn’t have). This was even reported in a Squeeze review in Linux Weekly News.

At some point, Ivan Borzenkov introduced a dropbox package to Debian but it was not based on the above package, instead it packaged directly the proprietary binaries. This was a bad decision because the binaries bundle a set of LGPL libraries and nobody from Debian wanted to do the required work to provide the corresponding source code. So the package got dropped (see bug #610300).

More recently several persons filed ITP (Intent To Package) bugs stating their willingness to re-introduce dropbox in Debian, but after many months lingering in the bug tracking system (see #544499, #613788), they have been turned back to RFP (Request For Package) because they changed their minds.

What I did

Being a dropbox user myself (despite the recent proof that data stored on dropbox is not 100% private), I offered sponsorship to the volunteers who wanted to package dropbox. But it turns out this was not enough to motivate someone to complete the task.

In the mean time I was still using the old dropbox package that was removed (it used to be downloadable from snapshot.debian.org).

While this was good enough for me, it’s clearly not OK in the long term and way too difficult for the majority of users. So this week-end I spent some hours to create a proper package.

It’s loosely based on the package provided by Dropbox but I upgraded the packaging and changed the way it works. I patched the dropbox wrapper to provide a “dropbox update” command that downloads and updates the proprietary binaries. They are now stored in /var/lib/dropbox instead of having a copy in each user’s home directory (~/.dropbox-dist/). This update command is run by the postinst so that installing the package immediately downloads the proprietary binaries.

Get the Dropbox packages for Debian

The package nautilus-dropbox has been uploaded to Debian unstable, it’s currently in the NEW queue but will shortly reach the mirrors. Then you will be able toYou can install the package with a simple apt-get install nautilus-dropbox (provided that you activated the non-free section since that’s where the package is hosted, it can’t be part of Debian since it requires the proprietary binaries to be useful).

It also includes packages for oneiric, but in theory once the package is accepted into Debian, it should appear in oneiric shortly after.

Package maintenance

I have done the initial packaging work but I don’t really want to maintain it in the long term. I have more than enough to do with dpkg and my other packages. So if you are interested in maintaining this package, please get in touch with me. You should know a bit of python since there are Debian-specific patches of the upstream code. The package is maintained in a git repository.

Feedback

If you have encountered a problem with one of those packages, feel free to leave a comment.

If you’re an happy user of the above packages, click here to find out how you can thank me.